Interview: iRobot's AVA Tech Demonstrator

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category.

AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it's capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

All of the sensor data crunching is taken care of by a heavyweight on-board computer, but the brains of the operation is really whatever AVA happens to be wearing for a head, in this case, a tablet PC. This makes it easy to develop applications to control the robot, which is a concept not unlike the iRobot Create: the building a robot part is done for you, leaving you to focus on getting said robot to do cool stuff.

There are also a bunch of interesting ways to interact with AVA. You’ve got the tablet of course, if you want to do things the hard way. A second Kinect camera on the bot can detect people and recognize gestures, and an array of microphones can detect and interpret voice commands. Finally, AVA’s round ‘collar’ piece has touch sensors all the way around, offering an intuitive way to steer AVA around.

While iRobot wouldn’t speculate on what’s coming next for AVA (disappointing), telepresence is an obvious first application. AVA also has a bunch of expansion ports that you can attach stuff to, which obviously makes me think manipulators. Personally, I’m hoping that now that AVA is out in the open, iRobot will keep us updated with some of the new ideas that they’re playing around with.